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In September, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced major changes to how colleges and universities handle sexual assault. But long-term changes remain unclear, even three months after the announcement. Our news director Michelle Billman sat down with reporter Jacob Solis to sort this all out.

Michelle Billman: So back in September, Betsy DeVos issued this new guidance. How does it actually change the rules that were laid out by the Obama administration and why?

When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos recently moved to undo an Obama-era expansion of Title IX enforcement, she left the world of higher education with a lot of questions. The old rules were meant to give more protections to victims of sexual assault on college campuses. DeVos says they go too far and deny those accused of assault due process. But at the University of Nevada, Reno, the people who work with sexual assault victims aren’t so sure.

When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos moved to undo Obama-era rules for Title IX investigations at colleges and universities, it left a lot of questions. Chief among them: what standard of evidence should schools use when they investigate possible sexual assaults? Reno Public Radio’s Jacob Solis has more.

In 2011, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague Letter that instructed colleges to use a specific standard in their investigations: preponderance of the evidence.

President Donald Trump is expected to sign the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a sweeping $1.5 Trillion plan to overhaul the nation’s tax code. The Republican backed-bill is supposed to provide middle-class families across the country with tax breaks, while at the same time creating more jobs by lowering the tax burden on corporations. But what kind of impact will the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act have on Nevada?

We hear a lot about the problem of homelessness in downtown Reno, but we don’t always hear from the actual people who are living on the streets. Today, we join Derek Rivera to learn what a typical day is like for him. Rivera is 33, and he was homeless in a handful of other cities before landing in Reno.

This story was reported by Prince Nesta for Our Town Reno, a multimedia street reporting project run by the Reynolds School of Journalism.

Women make up about 24 percent of workers in careers that focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math or STEM. In 2017, the L’Oréal USA For Women in Science Fellowship selected five postdoctoral researchers to support their work. One of the recipients is a researcher based at the University of Nevada, Reno. Our reporter Anh Gray visits Felicity Muth at her lab, where she’s studying how bumblebees learn.

The homeless shelters in Reno are full, with lines out the door, and temperatures are dropping. Our contributor Bob Conrad has been covering this issue for a ThisisReno podcast called Solutions. In the latest episode, he spoke with Reno Councilwoman Neoma Jardon about her efforts to build a tiny home village to help some of the city's chronically homeless residents. This is an excerpt of their conversation.